A hundred years is a relatively short period. It does not even exceed the span of a single human life. Yet the last hundred years have changed human life more completely than any period in the history of the world. It is as though the stream of time had been transformed from a slow flowing river to a roaring cataract. A hundred years ago the greater part of the human race was still living as it had always lived. The Far East was still a closed world as remote in thought from Europe as though it had been a different...

When the war began there was a tendency in many neutral quarters to minimize the importance of the issues, to view it as a war in the old style between certain European powers in which only their own national interests and prestige were at stake, or even to regard it as a sham fight put up to cover a strategic retreat to new diplomatic positions.

Today it is no longer possible for anyone to deceive himself with such illusions. This “phoney war” has revealed itself as a total war which takes no account of national sovereignty or international conventions or...

The fundamental issue that lies behind the present war and has to a great extent produced it is that of the disintegration of Western culture. Not that civilization is faced by the prospect of a new dark age in the same way that the Roman world was at the time of the barbarian invasions, it is rather a disintegration from within such as Rome experienced centuries before the coming of the barbarians when her material power was at its height. We are in a position to understand the state of mind of Tacitus when he wrote the preface to his...

During the last twenty years we have seen the collapse of constitutional government throughout Europe, and with it the loss of personal freedom and economic freedom and intellectual freedom—in fact all the liberties which the nineteenth century believed had been won or were being won as a permanent possession for humanity. Are we to believe that these liberties were a sham and proved their worthlessness as soon as they were won? Or were they so bound up with the social and economic circumstances of the last century that they were necessarily transcended by the new developments of twentieth-century culture?...

For a thousand years Christian Europe has existed as a true super-national society—a society that was intensely conscious of its community of culture in spite of the continual wars and internal divisions that made up its history. It resembled the unity of the Hellenic world which stood out against the non-Hellenic world as a society of free peoples against the despotisms of the East and as the civilized world—the world of “the good life”—against the world of barbarians.

Today this is no longer so. Europe has lost her unity and the consciousness of the spiritual mission. There...

It is not possible to discuss the modern situation either from the point of view of religion or politics without using the word “culture.” But the word has been used in so many different senses and is capable of so many shades of meaning that it is necessary to say something at the outset as to the sense in which I am going to use it, in order to avoid unnecessary confusion.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary gives three senses—tillage, improvement by mental or physical training, and intellectual development. None of these however is precisely the sense in which the...

The conception of a planned society has had a revolutionary effect on social thought and political action during the last twenty years and its importance is still hardly realized by public opinion. Yet it is possible that it marks a change in human civilization greater than anything that has occurred since the end of the stone age and the rise of the archaic cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia and the valleys of the Indus and the Yellow River.

No doubt it is implicit in the idea of applied science, as was already perceived by the men of the Renaissance such...

The Christian faith has always maintained the possibility of human salvation. Against the recurrent creeds of fatalism and materialism which have bound man’s fate to the stars or to the earth, it has maintained man’s freedom and his spiritual destiny. It has recognized more frankly than most human philosophies the reality of evil and the extent of the influence of evil on human nature. Nevertheless it has declared that this lustful carnivorous animal whose passions are infinitely more destructive and incalculable than those of the beasts of the jungle because they are guided by intelligence, is none the less capax...

We have seen that the Christian view of man and society is far from being a static traditionalism, as its rationalist critics have so often supposed. What distinguishes the Christian view of history from that of secular philosophy is above all the belief in the divine government of the world and the intervention of the Spirit in history and in the power of man, to resist or co-operate with this divine action. These conceptions are most clearly expressed in the prophets of Israel, who are in a special sense the bearers of the Sword of the Spirit. For the Prophets...

If the christian faith contains such vast sources of spiritual energy and power, if the Church is the divine organ of world transformation and the seed of a new humanity, how has it come about that the world—above all the Christian world—has fallen into its present plight? From the Christian point of view it is easy to understand persecution and external adversity and failure, but it is far harder to face the failure of Christianity on the spiritual plane. For it is not simply that modern civilization has become secularized, it is that Christians have allowed civilization to...

We have seen that the divisions of Christendom had their main source in social conflicts. Is it not possible to reverse the process and to find in common social action a way of return to a Christian social unity?

We are all being brought together today by the pressure of a common necessity. Our existence as free nations, our institutions and our way of life have never before been threatened as they are today. We are faced with great evils—so great that they may often seem unbearable—and yet in spite of all these evils we are being given...

The principle of vocation of which I have written in the last chapter is no less important for international order than it is for the life of the state and the community. If we trace the idea of vocation back to its original source in the Christian tradition, we find that from the first it had a twofold character, and that the spiritual vocation of the individual was inseparably linked with the historical mission of a people. For the calling of Abraham, “the friend of God,” was also the calling of a chosen people set apart for a world mission....